10. THE WEAKNESS OF THE STRONG | In Spike TV’s ULTIMATE FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP Ed Herman went against Jason “The Athlete” MacDonald in a middleweight bout and got himself swiftly bundled into a triangle choke hold — a clincher move, no escape from it, the helpless, reddening bulb of his head pincered between the Athlete’s strangulator thighs. Herman held out (that is, didn’t pass out) for a long time but at last, with a sort of drowning tenderness, tapped faintly three times for submission on MacDonald’s chest. A minute later, he was in the post-fight interview with Joe Rogan — his breath back, but his whole being immersed in a glum seethe of shame. “I felt myself going to sleep,” he told us, “and I should’ve fucking gone to sleep like a man. But I tapped out like a little bitch.”

Blake babies Nature is mysterious and mystical in "And the fair Moon rejoices" (at the BCA's Mills Gallery through August 16), as foreign as the wilds of New England probably seemed to its first English settlers. And maybe there are witches about.

GETTING TO KNOW PHILIP LARKIN WITH A NEW EDITION OF HIS POEMS | April 26, 2012 "A smash of glass and a rumble of boots/Electric trains and a ripped-up phonebooth/Paint-spattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out, and a kick in the balls." These lines are not by Philip Larkin, of course — they're by Paul Weller.

BLACK SABBATH ARE BACK — IN PRINT AND ON FILM | November 14, 2011 The literature on Black Sabbath — already extensive — will continue to grow, as we try, try, try again to wrap our poor noggins around the irreducibly cosmic fact of this band.